| Most engineers have more mechanical (or logical) sympathy than user empathy. This is not a bad thing, generally -- attention is a zero-sum system, and a profound awareness of human discomfort is not as important to creating systems that are good for the systems. The primary stakeholder in any engineering product is the medium in which you're working, and for software engineers, it means knowing how to work 'with the grain' of ten thousand different mechanisms. Yet humans seemingly arrive at the threshold of this world as inscrutable, outside forces, with capricious, unreasonable demands. Why would a user prefer a PWA, made with React and ten thousand pounds of JS goop, to something nice and clean (maybe executed in django and htmx?) Why would a user prefer some annoying elaborate third-party product integration, when they could instead just simply download a .csv? The engineers who specialize in bridging both worlds (frontenders) are themselves often less respected and esteemed by other engineers. People talk about FEEs as "just" frontend engineers -- as though knowing two complex kinds of system (the mechanism, and the user) were somehow less impressive than knowing one. (This is not an uncommon cognitive distortion; for example, ask a fluently bilingual person about this.) Part of the problem, I think, is that 'real' engineers think of product design as a form of visual design, which they then think about as a kind of subfield of aesthetics, like feng shui or cosmetics. This is probably because not enough engineers are exposed to _usability theory_, which is a rigorously and empirically tested body of knowledge that identifies and expresses the grammar of human-machine interaction. If I could have one wish granted, it would be to get every engineer to read at least one article out of NN/g (https://www.nngroup.com/) per month, and ideally, one per week. I wish everyone knew basic stuff like Miller's magic number (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus...) and the profound impact it has on system design and user preference. UX architects and frontend engineers, frankly, need more respect, and need to be listened to more frequently, by backend engineers and management alike. They also need to be hired in larger numbers and less frequently laid off (the recent industry-wide layoff convulsion has been particularly hard on designers.) And engineers of all kinds should have more opportunities to upskill and train in usability. For consumers, there's the old adage, "you get what you pay for." For product owners and engineers, I'd suggest a corollary: "you create what you value -- and you fail to create what you don't." |